Poetic Justice

       -- some thoughts on the work of Sylvia Ross





     It came in the mail, the second, expanded edition of Acorns and Abalone, a collection of poems, drawings and short stories by our beloved local author, Sylvia Ross.  First published in 2011 as "a collection of work" that she thought she put together mostly for her family, this 2013 edition is even more beautiful and more a gift to all of us who love truth and beauty in this natural world we inhabit and the long history of our relationship to this land.

     She's also finished a second edition of East of the Great Valley, a heart-breaking, mind-opening Civil War-era historical novel set in the Sierra foothills based on her Chukchansi great-grandmother's life.  Thinking about both works, I realized that what Sylvia accomplishes with her short poems, delicate drawings, and spare storytelling is justice:  she does justice to the truth of our complex lives and reveals the beauty of knowing it.

     Under the heading "Out of Sandy Loam and Red Clay," Sylvia has added 11 poems and three drawings to Acorns and Abalone.  In some, like "Reparation," she shows how the past lovingly cohabits the present:

 

a mother-in-law's

small even stitches mended

more than torn fabric

 

an elegant patch

where kind words sewn would soften

another's cruel

 

her sewing basket

with pins scattered out of place

waits for diligence

 

the fraying wicker

coaxes my complicity

in making repairs

 

     In others, she unravels the complexities of the food chain and our complicated place sort of at the top, from sea gulls eating shellfish resulting in beautiful shells on the beach to mosquitos sucking our blood.  In "The Hawk," she shows the painful reality of intercepting the eat-or-be-eaten cycle: 
 

          "....

           The hawk couldn't know her impulsive motive,

           how she intended the bird turned free to live,

           to fly, and how unable to loft the bird skyward,

           or let it go, she too was trapped.  In fear she heard

           a reedy high-pitched music screaming out

           filling the air, the shrill piercing noise of a shout

           going beyond the barn, a cry sent reaching

           to the sky - her own voice - a hawk's screeching."

 

     The new edition of Acorns also includes a short chapter from East of the Great Valley.  It is about the first Anglo heroine we meet in the book, Nancy McCreary, whose death early in the story left me bereft.  Nancy's truths carry on in her boys and eventually rescue the Indian girl Nancy saved as an orphaned infant, doing justice to the humanity of some people regardless of race.  But this chapter delicately lays out the human pecking order that masked the competition for land and the eat-or-be-eaten attitudes of those who came to dominate it.

     The new piece that took my breath away, however, is the poem "Frazier Valley," set against her drawing of the lone pair of palm trees there, a scene we here know by heart from driving the Frazier Valley Road:












 
     This 2013 Edition does more justice to the breadth of Sylvia's work.  I hope we will be seeing and hearing more from her in the future.  Both books are available locally at the Book Garden in Exeter, online at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com, or directly from Sylvia herself at (559) 594-4743.

 

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Trudy Wischemann is a wanna-be poet with a photographic eye who loves what her mind sees in Sylvia's pages.  You can send her your favorite passages of Sylvia's work % P.O. Box 1374 or leave a message below.

 





One Brick Shy

Published Sept. 11, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     "Let it come in," said the pleasant man who's been sharing his thoughts with me the last few months on the Dollar General project in Lindsay.  "We need something downtown."

     That certainly would have been easier.  With this added, unpaid workload, the last few weeks I've wondered if I'm one brick shy of a load.  But in honor of the democratic process and all the people who stand to lose, instead we sued the City of Lindsay and all interested parties to stop the project until certain conditions are met.

     Broadly speaking, one of those conditions is to obey the laws governing cities, particularly the laws regarding planning and development, but also the conduct of open government.  Our city has been ignoring those laws so long they think they're exempt.  In the name of everyone in the past who has been harmed by this arrogant ignorance and everyone who will be harmed in the future if it's not stopped, this lawsuit is a tap on the shoulder suggesting those days are over.

     Another condition is that the potential losses from, and problems created by the project, be assessed before it is constructed.  The project proponents - the City, the developer, and the property sellers - only proclaim the benefits.  Self-interest naturally guides the property sellers.  The developer's job is to convince the City that the benefits outweigh the costs; that's what he gets paid the big bucks to do.  The City's job, however, is to assess the costs and ensure that the benefits truly do outweigh them, and to require mitigation for costs to the community as needed.  Our City has not done their job.

     A third condition is to step up to the plate and include historic preservation as part of the City's development toolbox.  The 1989 General Plan, created 7 years before we became a Charter City and adopted the "strong city manager" form of government, commits the City to doing this.  Unfortunately, historic preservation has been seen as an impediment to the City's development desires since Scot Townsend rose to the top.  The proposed demolition of the Citrus Exchange Building for the original Dollar General plan was the most recent public example of a long string of Lindsay landmarks that were slated for removal during the Redevelopment Agency era.  One look at Exeter and Reedley, two towns that have preserved older buildings and landmarks in their downtown core, shows what can be done to attract people hungry for more intimate environments, places with a history.

     We need something downtown, alright, and it's not more brick sidewalks and landscaped bulbouts.  We need people to invest in their existing buildings and encourage businesses that will attract more foot traffic, not subtract from what already exists.  We need City staff who care about helping the existing businesses, not harming them, and who want to bring residents into the planning process, not exclude them.  We need the Council to recognize when sleights of hand are occurring and call the cards.  And most of all, we need residents willing to pitch in and hold the Council's feet to the fire until they require the staff to uphold the laws and protect all the town's residents, not just a few property owners.

     When we start getting these things, Lindsay won't be missing any bricks.
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Trudy Wischemann is an open-eyed student of small farm towns who dreams of their renewal.  You can send her your observations and dreams % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Nameless No More

Published August 28, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Today, the date of this posting, is the celebration in Fresno of the restoration of the names of the farmworkers' bodies buried 65 years ago in Holy Cross Cemetery after the plane crashed that was taking them, courtesy of the U.S. government, back to their homeland in Mexico.  Seeing a newsclipping of the event, Woody Guthrie wrote the words that would later be put to music by Martin Hoffman and become the song "Plane Wreck over Los Gatos," or more simply "Deportee."  Sung by almost every American folksinger all these years, from Pete Seeger and Joan Baez to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and now Joel Rafael, the song is one I have known and loved most of my adult life.

     When I first heard of this name restoration project from Tim Z. Hernandez, the project's fountainhead, I began telling everyone I knew and wrote my first column on it in May.  What I discovered was that most of the people I live among did not know the story and had never heard the song.  That lacking is a reflection of the suppression of the conflict that arose when Cesar Chavez and the UFW began agitating for changes in farmworker conditions:  wages, rules and regulations, the right to organize, exposures to pesticides, housing conditions - you name it.  Unlike most places on the urban coastal shelf I inhabited at that time, the union's demands were being placed upon the people who had the most to lose, the folks on the next rung up on the agricultural ladder.  The conflicts were so painful that most memories of that time have been buried.  As one elderly Hispanic man in my town who was on the UFW's march to Sacramento put it, "I am ashamed of that time.  So much conflict, so much pain."

     As I've watched this project progress from hope to dream fulfilled and beyond, it has occurred to me that the time is ripe for healing.  In that spirit I sang "Deportee" to my Methodist congregation yesterday, most hearing it for the first time.  The Spirit moves when and where it will.  I'm just glad I'm here to see it.  Here is the piece that was published in Wednesday's paper as "Nameless No More."

"It's a simple act of courage,
planting garlic in the fall -
a harbinger of better things to come ..."
     -- John Pitney, "Blue Heron, Fly" in Keeping the Garden, 2004

    Today I want to write about the simple acts of courage of songwriters and poets.  Every song my friend John, a Methodist minister in Oregon, has ever written has been a simple act of courage.  He'll never see, much less gather all the harvests of his plantings, which have occurred across the country and even here, from Fresno to Earlimart.  But that doesn't stop him.

     "I haven't written any songs lately," he complained to me over the phone a few weeks ago after telling me about standing on the Columbia River Bridge with a large group of people protesting fracking and the plan to transport its products by rail down the Columbia River Gorge.  "Don't worry, you will," I told him, explaining my theory of writing cycles of intake and output.  "I don't know," he said, "it might be time to lay down across some tracks."  Yikes.  To me, just thinking about fracking and the power behind it is a simple act of courage.

     Woody Guthrie's writing the song "Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos" was a simple act of courage.  He took some facts from a newspaper article about a plane wreck in 1948 in which 28 Mexican workers were killed being "returned," (i.e., deported) to their country, merged them with years of knowledge about farm labor conditions, and painted a picture that still moves people to tears today.  He did not write the music; he never performed the song.  I don't know if he even heard it performed before he died.  But he left behind an indelible story that otherwise would have been lost, not knowing if it would ever bear fruit.

     Sixty-plus years later a young Valley poet comes along, Tim Z. Hernandez, who finds himself called to follow a leading (as Quakers call it) to find out who these workers were and locate their relatives.  The son of farm laborers who worked in the fields himself, Tim was moved by his own story to discover the unmarked, invisible stories of the 28 who were buried in a mass grave in Fresno's Holy Cross Cemetery.  Just starting that project was a simple act of courage.  But now, more than two years later, with support from thousands of people across the country and more serendipity (or Grace) than you can shake a stick at, the names and relatives have been found, along with the $10,000 it cost to have a new grave marker installed with those names engraved on it, to be dedicated in a blowout ceremony next Monday, Sept. 2, 2013 - Labor Day.

     These two simple acts of courage correct a sin of omission from before I was born.  But the larger issues - the treating of immigrants who come here to work, just trying to survive, as non-persons, faceless, nameless, dispensable - and the perilous journeys they make and consequences they incur in order to do so - these issues are still with us.  Hopefully this small correction will point the way toward the next simple acts required.

     Writing about the spirit of hope that arrived to his farming friends in the body of a Great Blue Heron who appeared to them after a fire destroyed their barn, their crop, and their old John Deere tractor, John concludes the song with this about himself:

"And I may plant my garlic
in the shadow of the moon;
the neighbors know I'm looney anyhow!
But if we stop believing, then
our future has no wings.
Blue Heron, Great Blue Heron,
don't you dare desert us now!

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Trudy Wischemann is a social scientist who appreciates the missionary work of birds and bards.  You can view other columns on this site and leave a comment below.